by Alvin W. Gouldner

Abstract from Philosopher's Index:

Stalinism is historically analyzed as a regime of terror
in furtherance of a property transfer which utilized a personal dictatorship
and a burgeoning bureaucracy. The terror is seen as a function of the fact
that the regime represented a minuscule urban elite seeking to impose itself
upon an overwhelming rural peasantry who was unwilling to comply with the
directives coming from the urban center. Terror evolved here as a means of
state control, rather than the use of moral suasion, because the peasants
at the periphery were not seen as part of the elite's moral community. Not
being part of one moral community, the principle of reciprocity was not felt
to apply and unequal exchange and internal colonialism resulted. The regime
of terror derived also from its inability to supply material incentives and,
also, because the party's ideology of "scientific socialism" led
it to expect that the peasantry would be reluctant to collaborate in building
socialism. The core of what happened was a property transfer centering on
the "primeval episode"the forced collectivization of 1929which
led the tiny elite in the besieged urban center to institute the regime of
terror.

And note the introductory sentence to section titled "Great and Little
Traditions":

The new Soviet State was at first controlled by an urban-based elite, preponderantly
Russian and in part Jewish, whose advanced education, cosmopolitan travel
and culture, and town origins were basically alien to the vast rural majority
united in resistance to them, but whom they remained determined to rule.